The Berlin Sonnets

1.As if it were hard to begin. But one has already begun,the air is there, the song, the smoke above the Norman plaingoing up from Joan’s funeral pyre while the English stand around—I saw the sky still smudged from it when I passed on the busyears ago, passing by bus through famous places. Here Goebbelswas photographed with a cigarette and pretty woman,here Paul Valéry stopped to light his pipe and peeredabsentmindedly at a window full of soap, here Dvorákfed pigeons on his windowledge and spoke English. And so on,all in the same comic book called History, or,Our Dream of What Must Have Happened To Make ThingsThe Way They Are and Hurt So Much. Or are they?There’s something about Saturdays and politics, as if the fleshknew it for what it is, a sinister tragic sort of golf.

2.But I sat on the bus fingering my ticket—good for two hoursof nonstop riding and changing and going—I could visit the poorand still come back to the Zoo. I was in the middle of something,a sky so clean it looked like they scrub it down with sand.O blue Berlin you dream beneath my body! Or I am riding now,remember, and the pretty aqua bridge across the Spreecoaxes me to alight and interview the swans. And the birds—even these cultured and poetic drowsers—are allthat is free of history. Nothing ever happens where they areexcept themselves. To live in the sky! They hardly notice us,we are the ghosts in their lofty liberty, down herein the cellar, where ghosts belong, where when I was youngthey groaned all night behind the cellar door, choked mebreathless before I lost that soft virginity of fear.

3.One sits in one’s seat and listens to the conversationas if the bus runs on words. Streets pass neatly,traffic is mild. Why isn’t anybody worried? Not even me.Look at our faces in the glass, a face is a vertical landscape,a study of the distant heart, becalm thee, maiden,there is hope among the wheels. No one is close,no one far. Every person in the bus is enduringa different city, each one mapped on all the others,inexpressible, terrible, remote. The woman beside me,jolly, with rucksack, fresh from flying, is in a cityfurther than Lhasa, unreachable, sacred to her,her Berlin, her little neighborhood, I’ll never find it,she’ll never find mine. Wherefore are we all Ishmaelto each other, vague drifters, sand and rain and rabbleand we are war. Fifty years ago all this was just a fire.

4.Bloody history. Who knows what you mean.The mind that carries is also carried,there is a galaxy that moves these things aroundGo ahead and seem. Forgive the meaning.Everything sweeping towards Sagittarius,wise man with a beast’s body, arrow in his hand.We used to think we spoke the consonantsthat shaped some everlasting vowel,howl or groan or moan or sigh of timebut I don’t know. Things come and gowithout arriving or departing.We are archers curiously void of arrows,anxious in a targetless universe. We twang the bowonly for the music’s sake, I guess.

5.The summing up—such a long trial—begins. The evidencedied before any of us was born, the wind still smells of itsometimes—a lawyer does what he can. The gold.A morning sun reminds us, moonlight deludes us—under every shadow we suspect the moon’s been buriedand we dig. Theology, geology, logic, analytics,acoustics, optics, astrophysics—not onefrom Galilee to Ganges does much good.Witnesses shuffle and mutter in their chambersweary of the trial they once volunteered to guidewith fine speeches and rememberings towards the real.Who would be a lawyer in such weather?In my poor dining room, hardly room to eat,row after row of metal cabinets stuffed with truth.

6.Habe nun, ach ...! No need to mention allthe unprofitable fetishes and disciplines the hearttook for its master, then later brokeor forsook or ran right through the other sideinto that clear blue absence of commodityempty of discourse: the Actual.The sky before we flew in it. Just readthe floating lights of fairies and divinities,water drops and rainbow-lings, the goldangel on the Victory Column winkingher eye to catch my glance, I see, I see,that’s where all the trouble starts,I try to touch what the eye, that holier hand,already touched and measured, loved and let go.

7.And something was enough to say. Angelsinterviewed by churchbellsanswer with clouds. Little airplanesbumblebee across the valley.Every creature wants to go down.I remember the fullness of your armswhile we wept and talked of Dachau and ate well—I wondered at us—are we strange crowsgrieving and feasting at once on a ruined world?We are only an opera.The names are forgettable,what is remembered is the interval—the heart leaping up a ninth, say,or bathers in the surf up from an amazing wave.

8.Not when it is spoken to but when it speaks.Landgraves and tyrannies, little counts and servitudes,there is a goldfinch to my seed. Would she stopif I asked her to begin? There are churcheswhere no matter how many visitors are stirringthe shape makes you alone with mind—PieterSaenredam painted them, Haarlem, the stonesgive light—and in such dedicated spacesI have silenced hungers that the mind lets go.That’s why volcanoes speak, why Jewish womenhave red hair, why summer night’s so long.Something is stirring to be loose, or less, or lostinto the strange altitude we used to call heaven,just Japanese businessmen hurrying in big jets.

9.Now everyone’s offended. We have one mother and some fathers,we come from clan. O the povertyof our identity, to be so proud of what we guess we are.I am a church of that. Of such weightless stoneI build my plinth, with color alone. And set you on it one by one ,you victors in the heart’s olympiads, I medal youwith the bronze of my body’s shadows, silverof my deep water, gold of my vague eyes. I adore youin the empty measures. There is no music yet,it has not found the way to be. If it came to usit would be formal and would grant us spaceto dance inside it or alongside or not to move at all,just watch it pass, can music pass, a train of conquerors,what the not so ancient Greeks called a holy throngand heard them leaving the doomed city all night long.

10.Sixty years ago the stadium filled up with song.Two hundred thousand voices sang the opening hymnthe famous Richard Strauss had written for this day,my favorite composer, here at the hub of hell.I have a record of them doing it, how can you counteach voice in all that ardor, the orchestrablatant as an airplane overhead. Yet over the yearsI’ve come to hear and recognize them all, the bornand the unborn, music grants no exemptions to the dead,a girl who won’t be born till Saturday, shewas singing loudest, and all the bitter athletesblack and yellow in that nightmare time, theywere singing too. Sometimes there’s really nothing else to do.Music is the actual politics by which we’re ruled.

11.For it lusteth to take hold, and constrainall the lads and maidens of the town to dancemidnight naked round the broken chapelfor no delight but its delight, no harvestto its hoe-down. It is a kind of manacleslips round your soft pale wrist and pullsby pulsebeat to the chaffy floorwhere one way or another dancing does.And does it to us whether we’d be done or no.And deadbeat elders huddle in their bedsrefusing to be flesh among such eldritch liturgiesyet their minds can think of nothing butdo not listen to this music, do not listen darlingfor music means nothing but manipulation.

Robert Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960–1993 (Black Sparrow Press). He also wrote Lapis (Godine/Black Sparrow), Threads (First Intensity), and the novel The Book from the Sky (North Atlantic).